NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

[CX] The functionality described on this reference page is aligned with the ISO C standard. Any conflict between the
requirements described here and the ISO C standard is unintentional. This volume of POSIX.1-2008 defers to the ISO C
standard.

The fputs() function shall write the null-terminated string pointed to by s to the stream pointed to by
stream. The terminating null byte shall not be written.

[CX] The
last data modification and last file status change timestamps of the file shall be marked for update between the successful
execution of fputs() and the next successful completion of a call to fflush()
or fclose() on the same stream or a call to exit() or abort().

RETURN VALUE

Upon successful completion, fputs() shall return a non-negative number. Otherwise, it shall return EOF, set an error
indicator for the stream, [CX] and set errno to indicate the error.

ERRORS

EXAMPLES

Printing to Standard Output

The following example gets the current time, converts it to a string using localtime() and asctime(), and prints it to
standard output using fputs(). It then prints the number of minutes to an event for which it is waiting.

APPLICATION USAGE

This volume of POSIX.1-2008 requires that successful completion simply return a non-negative integer. There are at least three
known different implementation conventions for this requirement:

Return a constant value.

Return the last character written.

Return the number of bytes written. Note that this implementation convention cannot be adhered to for strings longer than
{INT_MAX} bytes as the value would not be representable in the return type of the function. For backwards-compatibility,
implementations can return the number of bytes for strings of up to {INT_MAX} bytes, and return {INT_MAX} for all longer
strings.

RATIONALE

The fputs() function is one whose source code was specified in the [??]. In the original
edition, the function had no defined return value, yet many practical implementations would, as a side-effect, return the value of
the last character written as that was the value remaining in the accumulator used as a return value. In the second edition of the
book, either the fixed value 0 or EOF would be returned depending upon the return value of ferror(); however, for compatibility with extant implementations, several implementations
would, upon success, return a positive value representing the last byte written.